I think in time Carter will be remembered as one of the better Presidents to hold the office. He had a tough break, but held true to his principles, and has done nothing but good since leaving the office.

TuteTibiImperes:I think in time Carter will be remembered as one of the better Presidents to hold the office. He had a tough break, but held true to his principles, and has done nothing but good since leaving the office.

It takes a lot of guts in life to do the right thing, promote the welfare of those around you and to be the type of person that walks away from a fight instead of being labeled "weak" for not indulging in rage, hate and violent fantasies.

It is for having all these traits in spades that Jimmy Carter was probably the best we had in recent memory.

And it's for these exact same traits that the American public will agree to despise him. The reasoning behind that being the same reasoning behind our depressing realities.

I wasn't alive then, but I've always been under the impression that Carter messed up two things - he told Americans to be less wasteful, and he allowed a botched raid to free the embassy captives in Iran.

I have to say, if we had spent that last 30+ years moving to solar and wind energy the world would be a much, much, much better place. And it's not like Carter is alone in going for a military solution, look at the Bin Laden raid - basically, Carter's sin was that the military failed him (and Obama's success was that the military did NOT fail him).

That said, I'm not terribly surprised that Carter has had a few nuts after him. The right hates him with a fury because he told them to wear a sweater and suggested that solar was a good idea (ideas they still resist with a fervor). I'm not sure why doing the right thing is so terrible, but then I'm not a fan of excess for the sake of excess. And I do actually believe the data of arctic sea ice melt, glacial retreat, and more extreme weather due to everybody in the entire world deciding that burning the everyloving shiat out of fossil fuels is the key to happiness.

Kevin72:Shakin_Haitian: From my limited interaction eith Reagan cocksuckers, Jimmy Carter had his hand on the mortgage interest rate dial and cranked that sucker up to 16%. Also, something to do with stagflation.

Inflateion did hit the fan during Jimmy Carter's time, but your Reaganauts all conveniently are amnesiac over Nixon and Ford also having that problem. I wonder if your Rabid Republican Reaganauts can recall Nixon's wage and price freeze attempt to curb inflation, or Gerald Ford's WIN program "Whip Inflation Now".

The truth is that inflation plagued all three presidents. States had to rewrite USURY LAWS just to allow an interest rate that was a bit higher than the inflation rate.

I have no idea how inflation disappeared. Reagan's voodoo economics? New World Order conspiracy?

First you have Viet Nam. The US decides to have a war, but refuses to pay for it (sound familiar? Only in this case they wanted to give to the poor (guns & butter) instead of the rich). A bunch of things go haywire, Nixon imposes wage and price controls (Republicans just love to use Socialism. They always get away with it). I think we might have left the gold standard around then, which was probably a choice between getting killed as inflation shoots well past the "real" price of the dollar, and getting killed by people buying our (undervalued) gold. In the middle of all this ('73 and then again in Carter's era, OPEC decides to crank the price of oil by a factor of 4 or so, cranking US imports through the roof (assuming they feel like selling at all)).

What happened? Paul Volcker (Fed Chairman) decided to not only take the punch bowl away, but to take it out back and shoot it. Without *any* available money (the Fed was charging banks over 20%), inflation eventually ground to a halt (of course, to do that meant unemployment went through the roof. Pretty much what is happening in Europe today, although even in the malaise it only hit around 10%). Anyone claiming that this was somehow still Carter's fault should realize that Reagan reappointed Volcker.

Most of this was from memory. The keywords to google for the real story are "guns and butter" and "Paul Volcker". Disclaimer, I was a small child when Carter was elected and not even a teen when Reagan was. But basically Carter got blamed for the fact that the medicine to fix an economy was painful. He also was never half the cheerleader Reagan was, and had a nasty tendency to tell the truth ("you can't handle the truth. You know what happened when someone dared call a malaise a malaise? People couldn't handle it!").

DoctorCal:muck4doo: adamatari: I wasn't alive then, but I've always been under the impression that Carter messed up two things - he told Americans to be less wasteful, and he allowed a botched raid to free the embassy captives in Iran.

Carter the politician has been incompetent, sanctimonious and a micromanager...and as for his supposedly wonderful human rights record, he wasn't above lying down with dictators when it suited his ambitions.

Cambodia? Under Carter we backed Pol Pot via the Chinese, same as Ford before him.East Timor? Under Carter we backed the Suharto dicatorship, same as the Republicans before and after.South Korea? Under Carter we backed the military strongmen, same as the Republicans before and after.Romania? Carter invited that monster Ceausescu to the White House and practically gave him a tongue bath.Zimbabwe? You can thank Carter and his UK counterpart Callaghan for Robert Mugabe coming to power. Only Carter could engineer a regime change where an authoritarian bigot winds up being replaced by a genocidal Marxist bigot.

And if Carter was this wondrous liberal hero, what on earth was Ted Kennedy doing giving Carter a primary challenge? In the summer of 1979 Kennedy had a huge lead over Carter in the polls. That was before the hostage crisis, and before the 1980 campaign heated up and enough Democrats figured out that Kennedy was still on the sauce.

muck4doo:adamatari: I wasn't alive then, but I've always been under the impression that Carter messed up two things - he told Americans to be less wasteful, and he allowed a botched raid to free the embassy captives in Iran.

adamatari:I wasn't alive then, but I've always been under the impression that Carter messed up two things - he told Americans to be less wasteful, and he allowed a botched raid to free the embassy captives in Iran.

diaphoresis:TuteTibiImperes: I think in time Carter will be remembered as one of the better Presidents to hold the office. He had a tough break, but held true to his principles, and has done nothing but good since leaving the office.

What are you on? Heroin?

Let me guess, you don't intend to elaborate?

/Considering how much Carter's been demonized, I'm not surprised he's had assassination attempts.//Demonized by many of the same people who worship the demented traitor that followed him.

TuteTibiImperes:I think in time Carter will be remembered as one of the better Presidents to hold the office. He had a tough break, but held true to his principles, and has done nothing but good since leaving the office.

You know who really wants Jimmy Carter dead? Those damned guinea worms that Jimmy Carter has worked so hard to eradicate these last few decades. If you haven't heard what guinea worms do to humans, and why Jimmy Carter is such a saint for saving Africa from the torture of these beasts, I will look for some of the juicier aspects to share.